Flicker Alley (Firm)

In late 1914, Charlie Chaplin was paid the then-unprecedented salary of

Chaplin’s eighth film for Mutual, The Rink, is one of his most popular comedies. Charlie is an inept waiter who prepares the bill of Mr. Stout (Eric Campbell) by examining the soup, spaghetti, melon stains and other remnants on the sloppy eater’s shirt front, tie, and ear.

Discover a time when the truest adventure had the wind at your back and an infinite horizon all around. Under Full Sail: Silent Cinema on the High Seas proudly collects five breathtaking films that preserve the romance, grandeur and allure of windjammers sailing open waters, exquisitely photographed in the style of the time.

On Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles there is a 150-seat movie theater that for over sixty-eight years has doggedly dedicated itself to the exhibition of silent films. Built in 1942 by maverick film preservationist and collector John Hampton, the theater championed silent film at the very moment when the Hollywood studios across town were busily destroying their nitrate inventories. With hard chairs, phonograph-record accompaniments, and mostly original...

The film faithfully retains the play’s famous set pieces—Holmes’s encounter with Professor Moriarty, his daring escape from the Stepney Gas Chamber, and the tour-de-force deductions. It also illustrates how Gillette, who wrote the adaptation himself, wove bits from Conan Doyle’s stories ranging from “A Scandal in Bohemia” to “The Final Problem,” into an original, innovative mystery play.. Film restorer Robert Byrne says, “It’s...

The most popular of the Mutuals, The Adventurer begins and ends with a chase. It is the fastest-paced film of the series, and although it has more slapstick than Easy Street and The Immigrant, it is redeemed by its construction, characterization, and Chaplin’s balletic grace.

Hunchback is a huge production: the sets depicting 15th-century Paris covered nineteen acres of Universal Pictures’ back lot and included the faade of Notre Dame Cathedral. Filming took six months and the climactic sequence employed two thousand extras, but it’s Lon Chaney’s performance that makes the character unforgettable. The Hunchback of Notre Dame premiered at New York’s Astor Theatre on September 2, 1923. The success of the film was...

The fifth film in the Mutual series, The Count, further develops the situations of films in which Charlie impersonates a man of means in order to underscore the contrast between rich and poor—one of his favorite themes.

Discovering Cinema is a 2 part collection comprised of Learning to Talk and Movies Dream in Color. Film historians Eric Lange and Serge Bromberg compiled materials from their own Lobster Films collection and material from archives throughout Europe and the USA to create these two historic documentaries illustrating the birth of sound and color cinema, perhaps the greatest cultural achievement of the twentieth century...Told from a European perspective,...

Saved From The Flames is a unique and wonderful collection of 54 rare and restored short films from the inflammable years of cinema. Movies were once made on nitrate film stock, which has a chemical composition similar to gunpowder and is highly vulnerable to fire and decay. This remarkable seven-hour anthology, organized in eight thematic groups presents amazing treasures from the vaults of Lobster Films in Paris and from the Blackhawk Films Collection,...